Cigar tubes. Metal, ivory-painted, with august script.
I feel like a robber. Releasing one red cap
from its grooves into a cupped palm,
my cupped palm, a streaming column of Winged
Liberty Head Dimes purls on warm flesh
into fresh air after half a century locked.
Their heft silvery, delicious. For his grown children
my father hid this stash. The common
alloyed silver's worth today fetches ten dollars
a dime, then spikes enormously if
blotched, or holds a Denver mintmark, or
double-struck die dates
producing five-digit years.
What of life in a five-digit year?
Did my father wonder? Your guess
as fair as mine. At my eye the jeweler's loupe
under exacting task light. Then I stop. Cold.
From the hunt for misaligned machining.
In the shadowy trench between Liberty's Phrygian
cap and wing, a foreign object is stuck.
Wetting my smallest finger, a tap to the agent.
It lifts. Miniscule. A curled note of human hair.
Before I can accept I have done so
I place my tongue to it. Hair of a father, fifty
years dead. A piece of him in my mouth.
No other person tended these coins. I picture him
arched over his cutting table, sequencing dimes
by year while dreaming tropical island blooms
and bamboo architecture into our ordinary family saga.
I sift and sable bits of turned hair surface. So two
or three more, no harm, certainly. Starved as I am, shooing
argent coins aside. Each fragile upearthed hair
I deposit upon the comforter of my tongue.
I do not know what this looks like to you.
I am the issue who approximates him so.
This daughter, who needed him to do the care
that must be done out of principle,
to speak with me and never finish. Traces of him
I take in to be close to his sum. Close as I can.
Fantastically, the shimmering busyness of unpossessing space
across the vast vaulted constellations
knows what this means—that which cannot now be asked,
nor be answered by either of us
or any person, or any of the meticulous
unabridged cave walls, parchments, or mount tablets
the peoples of the ages have produced.
Only this stormless voraciousness
I now step quick to embrace.